skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a similar experience with WoW, except that mine was pre-launch. After following it for some time, it was announced that cities could not be captured and I realized it was just not going to be a deep enough game to be worth paying attention to anymore.

I did finally run a trial of it earlier this year, after I had tired of Rift and SWTOR, and it was about as vapid as I expected; I got to level 20 and stopped.
there is no reason to test on devices running Android 2.3 or earlier.

You can pretty safely ignore devices running anything earlier than 2.3 but ignoring 2.3 right now just cuts out way too much of the market, unfortunately.

Third party libraries like ActionBarSherlock and HoloEverywhere make it possible to provide most of the modern Android experience on 2.3 but learning how to use them presents another hurdle that beginning Android developers shouldn't have to leap. I'd like to see Google provide much stronger leadership in this regard.
I'd be interested to know if it would be somewhat of an engineering feat to setup a message from Mark to every Facebook user through the messages tab. I wouldn't call this 'sending a message' though.
I agree. I tried to multiple times to purchase ThinkPads without the bundled software (I use Linux). But it is not an option.

This in fact is the only reason why I look at other offers at all. Every time I need a new laptop I re-check whether I get a ThinkPad without Windows, then I look around for other offerings that do not bundle useless software; so far the ThinkPads have just been better.

First thing I do is wiping the Windows and "factory" partitions and install Linux.
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I think, in the wrong circumstances, that escape that WoW offers can be addicting, dangerous and damaging

Like anything, which is why it's not helpful in this context to cast the net so wide as to include cigarettes and all the other stuff that the above poster tried to shovel into his point.
Prior art is a very nuanced thing. When I have a lot of money, I can have my talented legal staff persuasively argue that "many of us were doing similar things in the field at the time of this invention, and other public disclosures did not provide proof of invention, but rather an interest in similar applications," or something of that nature. Our new patent regime will be "First Inventor To File," so you just have to convince the patent examiners that the genius engineers at your LargeCo were clearly thinking about the ideas and creating the same inventions as anything else a prior art search might turn up.

You made me think about something, however. Maybe one of our solutions to this problem should be a very well organized, completely open source, "open registry." One of the other changes -- a concession, really -- that will come into place along with the new patent system will be a much-expanded definition of prior art. Now, as things currently stand it will become very easy to shoot down searches of discussion list postings and the sort as being relevant, but what if there was a true open, public registry of ideas/inventions? And moreover, what if we as a collective community encouraged ideas to go in there through social incentive; i.e., if I add a new invention to the registry that is actually awesome, people vote it up and I gain cred in the industry -- and if it's already in existence or something, others can comment/explain I'm not the genius I thought I was. You could also have some sort of a system whereby you could see inventions that are "forks" of others' ideas -- basically, a software version of the citations on a patent application.

Once we built this, and started using it, we could get the patent office (and patent offices around the world) to incorporate it into their workflow when evaluating applications. This could really help us in cutting down bogus filings, while making their job easier (music to every government employee's ears).

I know people have been making moves in this area, but perhaps it's time we get really serious about it. We seem to be better at coding things, than at lobbying, so maybe this is the way to go...
I'd love to talk about monetizing it. Link or email me andrew@brack.in? I know a few people that have been able to do this in the page.
In most cases, it's another avenue to make money.
Well, if you don't make the bill unfit to be reissued (or don't intend to), you're in the clear in the US. The law with coins is more lenient; as long as you aren't defacing them fraudulently, it's not illegal.
My suspicion is that apps provide for an enhanced-user experience ... for the app vendor. That is, they enhance the user-data available for demographic and marketing targeting.
Yup, Facebook's broken for me right now.
The default heap is 2MB, but will run with 756KB. If you want to skip the init.scm file (-q command-line option) it will run with just 10KB providing only definitions and C primitives, but I haven't tested this extensively - I had no idea they still made devices with such little memory :)
I think it is a great flag, if used with that functionality in mind. Useful reasons very similar to why the -p flag to mkdir is useful.
1/7th.
Infograph: Things To Know For Students And Professionals.
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Stackoverflow charges ~$200/month to have your own QA site on their platform.

I'd drop at least a couple hundred bucks a month on my own Kickstarter SaaS site that funds R&D science/technology research.

If you're on the Kickstarter team, read this ,and are interested, get in touch. I have my credit card in hand.
One small correction which I think makes the difference even clearer: the US government was not the first paying customer. SpaceX has already delivered several satellites into orbit for other non-US governments and corporations.
Maybe not the most constructive comment but what the hell is that picture? They are (were) a startup, not a boy band... Is this a new trend I was not aware of?
Apropos of our ongoing patent debate:

Interestingly, the design wasn't patented and companies
like National Semiconductor and Fairchild soon released
their own versions. This helped to push the price down and
ensured that the chip would become ubiquitous in the decades
that followed.
>News organizations have invested significantly in native apps for iOS, Android, WP7 and even, for a time, webOS -- yet nearly three times as many tablet owners and twice as many smartphone users access news primarily through browsers rather than apps, according to a Pew Research Center study released Monday.

Sorry, but the interpretation of this as "mobile browsers trump apps" is BS.

Of course MORE readers "access their news primarily through mobile browsers".

For one, there are THOUSANDS more news sites that are only available through the browser, compared to news sites that have native apps (and have them on both major mobile platforms).

A relevant question would be "what is the breakdown for a news site that has BOTH an app and a website?". The New York Times, for example.

And this is also focused on "news". What is the breakdown for non-news sites that also have an app. E.g Facebook?
Evan is hilarious, check out all the copy on http://phabricator.org/ for an example.

However he should probably have been described as ex-Facebook, he left quite a while ago.
"A group of kids with no experience or evidence of being able to execute who happen to catch a great marketing wind" describes many organizations that did become successful (including Facebook).
This is only part of the picture. This version of the driver is much slower than the driver based on libmysqclient. See the benchmarks at the bottom. It's a more real world test combining both reads and writes.

https://github.com/mgutz/mapper
Debunk The Myth That Copyright Is Needed To Make Money
emotional responses by weird aspies is not particularly surprising to me
The 555 was my introduction to ICs. It was an amazing little chip and I remember spending hours upon hours with it and a breadboard.
Ah, I hated that chip, but I have to admit for the price and flexibility you pretty much had to have it in your toolbox.
I don't pity the individual who gets bitten by his or her ignorance. I fear for consequences on a much larger scale. This ignorance, well, false sense of security, will likely have broader implications in the long run. The scale and where this leads is a much bigger problem than the individual being bitten.

Example: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/twitter-hands-ove...

Not only are there issues like this, but there are also various changes in privacy policies that lead to exposed information. That can't really be blamed on individual ignorance.
How to Build Hacker News like Reputation System in 30 mins
I am currently applying for a software patent.

And I am of two minds. The system sucks. It shouldn't be patentable. In fact, even if I get a patent, it won't be the determinant of success or failure; it's mostly there to make the company more attractive to investors.

On the other hand, is/ought problem. There's what I'd like the world to be. And there's what the world is.

(And yes: my lawyer is pushing me to come up with the broadest, vaguest description of my invention possible).
Did someone post it on HN with some decent activity? If not I think this post will do. I don't remember seeing it on any tech sites two months ago.
Maybe there won't be one big Facebook killer, but a thousand "niche" social networks, each with an average of a million active users, each hyper-serving its community. Hacker News, Second Life, Metafilter, deviantART, Ravelry (for knitters), and on and on...
It must be in that 'other messages' folder that no one ever looks in.
First-to-file is basically meant to get rid of "interference" lawsuits.

And, in general, it's not the apocalypse you might expect because prior art can still invalidate a patent.

The USA is basically on its own with first-to-invent. Everyone else is on first-to-file. And generally speaking, it works pretty well. There are absolutely anomalies, but there are mechanisms to deal with them. The payoff is a simply abolishing a massively expensive and difficult field of litigation.

It's a lot like how the Torrens land title system dramatically increased the security of land title, while also driving out whole classes of litigation and fraud. It changed real estate, land ownership and development for the better.

(IANAL, TINLA)
dexter killed him? maybe? I haven't seen the recent seasons.
Did anyone else get bugged by the following: "Patents are vitally important to protecting intellectual property"? Reading along, and WHAM, there it is out of nowhere.

It's not wrong, but it is also not true, since it is a tautology and so devoid of meaning. Patents ARE intellectual property, so the statement is a nonsensical "patents are vital to protect themselves". A circular argument.

I suspect the author is failing to distinguish between ideas and "intellectual property", and is trying to say "Patents are vitally important to protecting ideas". An idea is not intellectual property though. It is born naked and free and has no inherent attributes of property, such as limitations on its use. It is patents that attempt to convert ideas into property, and the onus should be on the patent advocate to demonstrate benefits over unadorned ideas.

It bugs me that so many "software patents are bad" articles go like this:

1. Example of why software patents are bad.

2. Unsupported assertion that patents are essential.

3. Unsupported assertion that pharmaceuticals will not be produced in the absence of patents.

4. Half-baked conclusion that something must change, but it's a scary thing to do because it might kill innovation.

Why not do it this way?

1. Start with the assumption that monopolies are bad for innovation and innovation happens best in a free-wheeling environment.

2. Example of why software patents are bad.

3. Critical examination of whether patents might have any benefit in other areas, such as pharmaceuticals.

4. Unless shown to be generally good in step 3, conclusion that patents are generally bad, with exceptions (possibly none) as identified in step 3.
I _LOVED_ the fact that they had an engineer co-hosting the webcast. He wasn't the typical pretty-boy spewing stuff from a teleprompter that he didn't understand, and his post-launch elation said it all.

Go for quality information, even if it's a bit rough around the edges from a BS marketing standpoint.

Get a REAL rocket scientist spreading the word.
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guardian has a great app (at least on android), the text is super-readable, and it downloads stuff for offline usage, so I open it when I feel like it, and it's one news app where I can sincerely tell an app can gives a lot of added value instead of being a slow reader with another layout.

the rest I read mostly through pocket or through a link on twitter, which lauches [drumroll] a browser, where I'm almost always pissed off as they work poorly on a small mobile screen. first they don't care about a good mobile experience, then they complain that tools like pocket exist and strip off their ads.
rm -rfi results in a lot of noise, and it becomes a habit to simply dismiss the warnings without reading them.
1. Why do a survey when you could measure user behavior directly?

2. It sounds like the survey was concerned with the various newspapers' first party apps, but what about third parties? For instance, I read most of my news on my iPhone via Twitter (app), Reddit (app) and Hacker News (app). Oh, and let's not forget Instapaper (app).

If I had to bet, I'd say that these results have nothing to do with HTML5 or the capabilities of the mobile web, and everything to do with the rise of aggregators and social networks.
This is a meta-piece about another article. The actual article:

http://www.nature.com/news/nobel-laureate-challenges-psychol...

The actual article is worth a read, I was a little intimidated after reading "here’s some overmatter that didn’t make it into the piece because of length" but the actual article is only 712 words. The over-matter is 500 words.

More background about the problem:

"Replication studies: Bad copy" http://www.nature.com/news/replication-studies-bad-copy-1.10...
What interests me is why Twitter made this.
So... why use Kickstarter at all? Projects could just as easily be marketed on HN & Reddit. Does the backer feel safer going through KS?
5 simple steps to test and validate your first startup / product idea
That's a very worthwhile point but there are a few major reasons why it's a more problematic strategy.

First, reliability. When you engineer a vehicle as large and as complex as an orbital launcher which only operates once in its entire lifetime you typically need to over-engineer a lot of key parts of the thing in order to ensure a high level of overall reliability. This runs counter to the sorts of optimizations necessary to bring production costs down by orders of magnitude. More so, when a full up test inevitably results in the destruction of the vehicle (because it is expendable) and tests cost as much as a launch (tens of millions of dollars) it makes it very, very difficult to evolve the design of the vehicle extensively.

That leads to a catch-22, you have to run a lot of launches to make the vehicle design significantly cheaper to manufacture. Buuuut, now you've vastly increased the development cost of the vehicle so you've erased all of the cost gains you've made.

But, if you design for reusability then you can actually increase reliability because the cost of the vehicle is amortized over multiple flights, so you can have a more expensive vehicle.

Also, while a lot of aerospace components (like fuel tanks, electronics, etc.) can be mass produced with the right design, this is a lot more difficult with rocket engines which have a very high number of precision machined parts made out of special alloys. This makes the engines the long-pole in the costs of a rocket, and it's very difficult to reduce those costs. Right now SpaceX is already the world's largest manufacturer of high-power rocket engines, so if there was a way to cut costs on them they would already be on top of them.

Now, back to reusability. Another thing that you get from reusability is that testing can be much cheaper, since you can make incremental changes to a vehicle design and then re-test it.

With reusability you have the best of all 3 worlds. You have reliability, you have low per-flight costs, and you have an enhanced ability to prove out potential vehicle redesigns economically.

Now, if the size of the launch market were much larger and reusability were more difficult then the equation could change, because it might be easier to recoup expensive cost-saving efforts over a shorter period of time.
Aww man! I missed this when it happened. I can be dismissive of Arduino-based timing projects, driven in part by cherished memories of making LEDs blink and speakers chirp annoying through use of a 555.

RIP Hans.
Checkout apify - http://apify.heroku.com/resources & scrapify - https://github.com/sathish316/scrapify
Library to scrap HTML content as JSON data.
Cool idea. It'd be good if there was some user voting in there to make it more of a chart that just one persons opinion though.
While it's evident that Bank of America and Facebook are two different animals with entirely unique cultures, it's is worthwhile to mention that Facebook does balance the "Most fast, break things" mantra with proper control mechanisms.

For example, there is a layer called Gatekeeper that ensures only certain features are shown to users and that with a flick of a switch, code can be decommissioned in the event of a crash or breach.
Facebook is, by a huge margin, the buggiest release software that I use every day. When I look hard, I notice at least a dozen UI bugs a week. Yet, Facebook is hugely successful -- so successful, in fact, that it's hard for me to think of ways in which it could be more successful. Your comment implies that there is some threshold that they will pass, at which point they will be forced to adopt more stable sensibilities. There are 1 billion active users [1], so I ask: if they haven't gotten to this point, when exactly will they?

I don't believe the lack of quality in Facebook code poses an existential threat to Facebook, and I don't believe it ever will:

(1) Facebook code is not Google code, but it is not bad code, it's just not needlessly good code. If Google is consistently buggy, anyone can switch to Bing. On the other hand, switching from Facebook is really hard. Their core services are not easily replaceable. People are willing to put up with more. Note that this is even true in the case of businesses: Facebook is horrible to develop against, but developers don't have a choice.

As the network grows, this cost will be higher, which means Facebook can throw its weight around more, not less. This is exactly opposite of the situation you predict. The only thing that can really reverse this is if there is a viable competitor, but the increased growth of Facebook makes this increasingly unlikely. It is clear, in any event, that G+ is not quite there.

(2) By maintaining a lower bar, Facebook actually has an advantage. It is a website, and can fix its product at will. Code can be deployed quickly and rolled back accordingly, making failure cheap. This means they can concentrate on things that really matter like user acquisition.

(3) Facebook does not run nuclear reactors or bank systems. There is a high incentive to switch from buggy bank systems. There is little incentive to switch from buggy social network websites.

footnotes:

[1] whatever that means
yeah, but when you position yourself as a facebook killer from the start, you better kill facebook or you lose the hype and die.
Evan is the man - he is without doubt one of the funniest people I knew at Facebook.

We're also big fans of Phabricator over here at MemSQL.
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link points to ACM premium content ... original PDF: http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/papers/cacm12.pdf
What was to hate?
That 2% figure is quite interesting (and the study beautifully typeset), but I can't read Swedish. Can anyone find a translation anywhere?
This is such a grey are that I think it's close to impossible to make a rule about how much quality you should sacrifice for the sake of speed. Sometimes you might get lucky and break something insignificant, sometimes you create the IceBox Pro fiasco and be remembered at "that company". It's all calculated risk / gambling.

On the other hand, perhaps someone will argue that all publicity is good publicity.
> It won't be safe to suggest ideas openly anymore. It won't be safe to talk about "what if" or "have you considered" or "someone should really." We are going to see a flood of really bad patents based on other people's ideas -- and that's exactly what our lawmakers have provided to their friends in large businesses.

That's not how first to file works. It just changes is what happens if two or more otherwise eligible people apply for the same patent. What I mean by "otherwise eligible" is that they would be entitled to the patent if there was not a conflict with another inventor claiming the same invention.

When there is a conflict (which does not happen for the vast majority of application), then first to file changes the resolution so that the winner is the first inventor to file, rather than the inventor with the earliest constructive invention date. (The constructive date is not necessarily the date you came up with the idea. If you come up with the idea, start working on reducing it to practice, but then stop for a while and then start again, your constructive invention date jumps from the date you came up with the idea to the date you resumed working on it. Each time you stop and start, your date jumps forward).

If you come up with some idea and have no intention of patenting it, you want to talk about it publicly under first to file just as much as you do under first to invent, in order to get it out there as prior art.
There's an interesting subtlety here: "We won’t charge your card until your Lockitron is ready."

The Kickstarter model has a few appealing characteristics for hardware: evaluate product-market fit, gauge initial order size, and get upfront capital.

By giving up the upfront capital (presumably because they don't need it), they can allow refunds or cancellations, unlike Kickstarter. This is great for customer confidence and relationships. But they keep the other incredibly valuable parts of the Kickstarter model, which are crucial for hardware startups.
Established rocket makers can do this. They've never had the incentive before, at least in the US, because the more you cut costs in a cost plus contract the less money you make. But they certainly have the engineering chops, and they can spin off a subsidiary if the organizational pressures are too unwieldy.

The problem is they're in the same position AOL was in when people started to get high speed internet. There's no way they can make a cheaper rocket without gutting their own high-margin government business, so they'll pretend as long as they can.
The "break fast and move things" mantra isn't black and white, nor is it universal. It is a general alignment that, at the high level says, don't be afraid to make calculated mistakes but be prepared to quickly respond to feedback and those mistakes as appropriate.

That means a privacy or a security issue will be tackled with the utmost urgency--we would even shut down the site if we didn't have a quick fix for a security/privacy bug. However, if one of the Timeline aggregations isn't working or if a particular text box is not aligned, then we will fix it with the next release (usually in another day or half).

So it's not true that "move fast and break things" means "it's OK to introduce privacy/security holes" or even "it's OK to release shitty products". It just means we push early and push often.